Occasional Papers eBook

His anxieties are characteristic. The paper shows,
we think, that it has not escaped him that disestablishment,
however compensated as some sanguine people hope,
would be a great disaster and ruin. It would be
the failure and waste to the country of noble and astonishing
efforts; it would be the break-up and collapse of
a great and cheap system, by which light and human
kindliness and intelligence are carried to vast tracts,
that without its presence must soon become as stagnant
and hopeless as many of the rural communes
of France; the blow would at the moment cripple and
disorganise the Church for its work even in the towns.
But though “happily improbable,” it may
come; and in such a contingency, what occupies Mr.
Gladstone’s thoughts is, not the question whether
it would be disastrous, but whether it would be disgraceful.
That is the point which disturbs and distresses him—­the
possibility that the end of our later Church history,
the end of that wonderful experiment which has been
going on from the sixteenth century, with such great
vicissitudes, but after every shock with increasing
improvement and hope, should at last be not only failure,
but failure with dishonour; and this, he says, could
only come in one of two ways. It might come from
the Church having sunk into sloth and death, without
faith, without conscience, without love. This,
if it ever was really to be feared, is not the danger
before us now. Activity, conviction, energy,
self-devotion, these, and not apathetic lethargy,
mark the temper of our times; and they are as conspicuous
in the Church as anywhere else. But these qualities,
as we have had ample experience, may develop into
fierce and angry conflicts. It is our internal
quarrels, Mr. Gladstone thinks, that create the most
serious risk of disestablishment; and it is only our
quarrels, which we have not good sense and charity
enough to moderate and keep within bounds, which would
make it “disgraceful.”

The main feature of the Letter is the historical retrospect
which Mr. Gladstone gives of the long history, the
long travail of the later English Church. Hardly
in its first start, under the Tudors, but more and
more as time went on, it instinctively, as it were,
tried the great and difficult problem of Christian
liberty. The Churches of the Continent, Roman
and anti-Roman, were simple in their systems; only
one sharply defined theology, only the disciples and
representatives of one set of religious tendencies,
would they allow to dwell within their borders; what
was refractory and refused to harmonise was at once
cast out; and for a certain time they were unvexed
with internal dissensions. This, both in the
case of the Roman, the Lutheran, and the Calvinistic
Churches of the Continent, requires to be somewhat
qualified; still, as compared with the rival schools
of the English Church, Puritan and Anglican, the contrast
is a true and a sharp one. Mr. Gladstone adopts
from a German writer a view which is certainly not